The pace of online shopping revenue growth means it is important for retailers and manufacturers to understand how consumers behave online compared with their behaviour in brick and mortar stores. We conducted a study in which the detailed behaviour of 40 shoppers was screen recorded while they each undertook an online shopping 'trip'. The shopping trip comprised purchasing a basket of 12 commonly bought grocery categories at one of two major retailers. The shoppers were all inexperienced in online grocery shopping. Results show that online grocery shopping is fast, even for these consumers who were new to it -half of the online shoppers spent less than 10 seconds purchasing from a category. This result is very similar to that of past studies in physical stores. Indeed, half of all the 12 item-shopping trips took less than 10 minutes. Also, most purchases were made from the first category page displayed in the retailer's online store. Shoppers also consistently used the default display options chosen by the retailers but used a combination of navigational tools to find their products. We conclude that online shoppers do not behave differently from those offline in terms of time spent or effort expended. Online shopping, in the grocery context at least, seems to primarily reflect a desire for time efficiency on the part of the shopper. In that regard, online shopping seems very similar to in-store shopping. The study begins the job of documenting shopper behaviour into this new channel and provides practical knowledge for retailers and manufacturers.

This study investigates the variation in brand growth and decline across many different product categories. It uses recent consumer panel data from the UK, covering 639 brands across 28 categories, including food, personal care, home care and pet food, over a five-year period from 2008 to 2012. Consistent with the literature, the study finds that most brands in the consumer packaged goods market are stationary, as only 14% of the brands change their market share by more than three points. However, the study discovers that some categories are more dynamic than others. The percentage of brands that change their share by more than three points is different across the categories, varying from 0% to 44%. The study further examines some potential factors that can affect the variation and finds that category penetration and purchase frequency have significant effects on the variation. The lower the category penetration and category purchase frequency, the lower the brand share stationarity. On the other hand, proportion of sales on promotion in the category and new SKU introductions do not have a significant effect on the variation.

Purpose Increasing and maintaining the population’s consumption of healthful food may hinder the global obesity pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test whether it is possible for healthful sub-brands to achieve higher consumer behavioural loyalty than their less healthful counterparts. Design/methodology/approach The study analysed three years of consumer panel data detailing all purchases from five consumer goods categories for 15,000 UK households. The analysis uses best-practice techniques for measuring behavioural loyalty: double jeopardy, polarisation index, duplication of purchase and user profile comparisons. Each sub-brand’s healthfulness was objectively coded. Findings Despite the level of healthfulness, all sub-brands have predictable repeat purchase patterns, share customers as expected and have similar user profiles as each other. The size of the customer base, not nutrition content, is, by far, the biggest determinant of loyalty levels. Research limitations/implications Consumers do not show higher levels of loyalty to healthful sub-brands, or groups of healthful sub-brands. Nor do they buy less healthful sub-brands less often (as a “treat”). There are also no sub-groups of (health conscious) consumers who would only purchase healthful options. Practical implications Sub-brands do not have extraordinarily loyal or disloyal customers because of their healthfulness. Marketers need to focus on growing sub-brands by increasing their customer base, which will then naturally grow consumer loyalty towards them. Originality/value This research brings novel evidence-based knowledge to an emerging cross-disciplinary area of health marketing. This is the first study comparing behavioural loyalty and user profiles towards objectively defined healthful/less healthful sub-brands.

This paper describes the patterns discovered in fruit and vegetable buying behaviour in the United States and India. Using claimed buying data obtained from online questionnaires, it compares the patterns against those found extensively in consumer goods categories across the world. This study analyses consumer loyalty with Double Jeopardy, consumer sharing with Duplication of Purchase and brand user profiles with Mean Absolute Deviations. The results show the buying behaviour patterns of Double Jeopardy, Duplication of Purchase and that brand user profiles exist within the fruit and vegetable categories. The implications of these findings are: (1) that the size of fruit and vegetable brands are largely determined by how many people buy them and not how loyal those consumers are; (2) fruit and vegetable brands share consumers with one another; and (3) fruit and vegetable brands are not purchased by unique segments of the population. Therefore, in order to increase the number of people buying fruit and vegetable brands, marketers should focus on increasing their mental and physical availability (i.e. the same strategies used for consumer goods brands).

This paper investigates consumer's behavioural loyalty to online supermarkets over time. We use three measures of behavioural loyalty (share of category requirements, repertoire size, and polarisation index) from four major online supermarkets in the UK across five categories. We find that loyalty to online supermarkets is high in the categories we examined, though it declined somewhat from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently remained stable from 2010 to 2014. We also extensively test the generalisability of the well-known Dirichlet model to the choice of online supermarkets. We find that the model gives better fit from 2010 to 2014 than from 2005 to 2009 and can describe loyalty and competition in this context.